Movie Reviews

This weekend was pretty much perfect. Saturday I finally made good on my promise to take Martin and Alex to the movies (the fact that I wanted to see Los Vengadores helped fuel that along). I saw online that the first showing was at 3, so I told them to come down to my house when they were ready to go. They ended up showing up at 9:30 in the morning, not really what I had in mind. Luckily it's almost impossible to sleep past 8:30 here so I was already up and showered. We headed down to Parramos to catch the bus, all while images of my last bus ride to Chimal flashed through my head. While we were waiting we ran into Tia Rosa and guilted her into coming with us. She reminds me so much of my mom and I was really excited that she was going to come with us. She's only been to the movies once in her life and that was on vacation to Italy several years ago. I was a little worried that she'd end up hating the Avengers, but was also interested in how she'd react to the special effects.

When we got to the mall we realized that the first showing of Los Vengadores wasn't until 1p but they had Battleship at 12:30p. I've been in love with Taylor Kitsch since his Tim Riggins days so I didn't need a lot of convincing.

Yep, very little convincing.

We decided to have lunch together first (Dominos 2 for 1 day, woohoo!) By the time 12:30p rolled by Tia Rosa had had her share of our company and decided to head back home. She promised to join me for a movie in the future so hopefully I'll be able to choose one she might like a bit better next time.

The movie theater itself is set up pretty much the same as the ones in the States. You can only buy tickets 15 minutes before the show starts, so there was a line at the ticket counter waiting for them to go on sale. Once we got our tickets (Q20 each, about $2.50! Guess what I'll be doing every weekend now?) we headed to the counter for mandatory snacks. Like the States, snacks are ridiculously overpriced here too. Their idea of overpricing lines up with normal prices back home though, so we paid $2 for a bag of M&Ms. Not too shabby, though I did skip out on the popcorn. One difference here was that they were SUPER strict about outside food coming in. They searched all our bags and wouldn't let us take in our leftover pizza (we sent it home with Tia Rosa instead).

The theater itself was set up exactly like our theaters: comfy chairs, stadium seating. They didn't have the oh-so-fun trivia questions while we waited, but I did get to hear my first taste of Guatemalan country music which was entertaining. Everything from that point on was normal, complete with folks texting and talking on their phones throughout the film (something that I got used to in NY). This theater doesn't do subtitles so it was also my first full-on Spanish movie experience.

So, the movie itself... I don't know if it was because I only understood half the dialog, I was feeling nostalgic about my brother who's enlisted in the Navy, or if I was just blinded by TK, but I LOVED Battleship. Again, it's hard to comment on the dialog because I only caught a portion of it, but even without that I found the story line easy to follow. I thought Rihanna's character (and women in general) were shown kicking ass without making a huge deal of it. The effects were awesome too, though that was to be expected. All in all, I really liked it and would recommend it to everyone.

After the movie the guys left and Stephanie and Charlotte came to the mall. The three of us went to the next showing of The Avengers which was really friggen hard to understand. I guess the plot was a lot more complicated than the Navy blowing up alien spaceships because I felt completely lost on several occasions. It also sucked missing almost all of Tony Starks jokes; the audience was laughing and I was sitting there stone faced trying to frantically translate things in my head. I enjoyed this movie too, but since it took a while for the action to start, I felt like it was a lot more boring than Battleship. Also, Captain America is stupid. His special power is to throw a shield around? Lame. And I still have no clue what Black Widow's power is. She just talks to people really well? And that arrow dude was lamest of them all. But again, an hour and a half of things blowing up and watching Thor can't be all that bad. You could sit Chris Helmsworth on a stool for an hour and a half and I would pay to watch that.

Things I found confusing about this film: (spoiler alert!!)

1) When Hulk transforms the first time he's totally blood thirsty and tries to kill everyone in his path, including Black Widow and Thor. The second time he's all buddy-buddy with them and exclusively goes after the bad dudes and giant worm monster. What changed?

2) Also, this is probably due more to bad translation than anything else, but didn't Black Widow say something about Loki needing a bunch of Gamma rays for something, and then discovering that his plan was to use Hulk as a weapon or something? Did that ever happen? Because then Hulk jumps out of the plane and isn't in the movie for the next half hour.

3) Why didn't Fury just let Thor take Loki back to their world when he first showed up? Did he think that he'd just escape again?

4) What was the back story with Black Widow? Something about her dad being a bad guy and now she has to help out SHIELD? Or she was a bad guy in the past and now she has to help?

I liked the Avengers, but mostly for the fight scenes. All the writing was completely wasted on me, so I'll have to go back and watch it in English once it's available on DVD (which should be sometime next week since there's a huge bootlegging industry here).

Another cool note about this experience: they have bathroom breaks in the middle of movies here! Halfway through Avengers the film crawled to a stop and the lights came on. I thought something had screwed up, but then one of the movie employees came in and said we all had a five minute bathroom break. Totally awesome.